


Songs My Mother Taught Me

by dragonifyoudare



Series: Older stuff [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Brief Mention of Sexual Assualt, Brother-Sister Relationships, Fall of the Ostwick Circle, Family, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Pre-Inquisition
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-23 05:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8315896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonifyoudare/pseuds/dragonifyoudare
Summary: “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t… I didn’t know where else to go.”
   It was the voice that did it. Even all the exhaustion it bore, even through more than twenty years of separation, Mera knew her Signy’s voice. Her daughter was, impossibly, home. (Half a year before the Conclave, the future Inquisitor comes home.)





	1. Mera

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Sarsaparilla](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarsaparilla/profile) for betaing!

When Mera came home to find a human asleep with her head on the kitchen table, she panicked, turning to flee. Her son, Osin, was coming through the doorway behind her, and the two of them tumbled out into the moonlit alleyway. The sack of onions Osin had been carrying spilled its contents into the unpaved muddy ground. She felt a surge of anger at the intruder, but she tamped it down. She was good at that. She’d been tamping down anger at humans her whole life.

The racket probably woke the most of the neighbors, but only Enalan’s brat was rude enough to poke his head out a window. As Osin cursed and gathered up onions, Mera rose slowly to peer back into their ground-floor lodgings. The human was standing now, and Mera got a better look at her.  She was tall and the sort of almost-skinny that you got from a frame that naturally tended that way but had too much food to really qualify. Her brown hair was in a fraying braid that reached below her shoulders, and though her face was hard to see in the dark, the blood caked on the left side was obvious. Her clothes were caked with dust and worn inside out. That last part struck Mera as funny, despite everything happening around her, and she held back a hysterical giggle. She realized her hands were shaking.

“Ma’am,” she said, voice flat, “why are you in my home?”

The human stepped forward, into the dim light from the doorway. The cut the blood had come from was a nasty one, curving around the socket of her left eye and onto her forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t… I didn’t know where else to go.”

It was the voice that did it. Even all the exhaustion it bore, even through more than twenty years of separation, Mera knew her Signy’s voice. Her daughter was, impossibly, home.

* * *

 

Mera had given birth to Signy on a particularly cold Wintermarch day twenty-seven years ago, with the aid of a human midwife who kept washing her hands after touching Mera even before the blood started. The father had payed for the midwife. Bann Trevelyan might have been a liar and a lecher, but he had cared enough for that much. He’d probably spent more to buy the woman’s silence than he had to buy her services. When it was done the midwife had told her she was lucky that it had gone so smoothly, then remarked that elves must birth as easily as cows. Mera had been too exhausted to spit in her face.

She’d given her daughter a human name because that was all the advantage she had to give. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but it was pretty and sounded nothing like an elven name.

Maybe that would have mattered, if not for Signy’s abilities. The Circle took Mera’ daughter before she had a chance to find out what kind of life the girl might have lived. Signy had her grandmother’s gift. The only things her father had given her were flat ears and the surety that she would never be welcomed by his people or Mera’s. Mera hated him for that almost as much as she hated him for leaving.

Mera had wanted better for her daughter than she’d had, and for her son when he came. She herself had grown up following her mother, a hedgewitch expelled from a Dalish clan as a child, from village to village, hunting their dinner as often as they traded for it. She’d come to the Ostwick alienage at sixteen, sure anything was better than life with her mother. A year later she was pregnant with the child of a rich human, but she loved him and he said he loved her and that they could run away together, and she believed him. She had wanted better for her children, and she knew she hadn’t done that for Osin, but back when Signy had been taken Mera had told herself she’d be better off in the Circle, that she had succeeded for her daughter at least. Now, looking at this bloody woman hiding her mage’s robes in their own lining, leaning on table like it was the only thing holding her up, she knew she had failed her too.

* * *

 

Mera couldn’t look her daughter in the eye even as she wiped the blood off her face and applied a few dabs of precious herbal salve. Osin couldn’t stop staring. He’d been barely a year old when they’d lost Signy, and Mera had rarely spoken of his half-sister to him.

“I don’t see Hanol,” said Signy, breaking the silence that had filled the room since Mera had ordered her son inside  _ now _ and her daughter back into a kitchen chair. Osin hadn’t listened -- they’d paid too much for the onions to waste them, he growled -- but Signy had. That was a change from her childhood.

“He’s dead,” said Osin. “Last year.”

Signy flinched, smearing the salve Mera was applying into her eye. She flinched again and blinked at the resulting pain, but didn’t reply at first. When she did, her voice was quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He was a good man.” Her gray eyes, eyes she shared with her mother and brother, flicked over to Osin. “I know he wasn’t my father, but--”

“Damn right he wasn’t,” snapped Osin, slamming a fist into the table.

“Osin,” hissed Mera. “The neighbors will hear!”

“Let them!” he nearly shouted. But he quieted his voice to add, “We should have turned her in to the templars already.”

“You can’t,” said Signy, and Mera wasn’t sure if her heart jumped in fear or just joy at the sound of her daughter’s voice. “They’re dead.”

Tense silence opened up in the wake of Signy’s words, but as Mera opened her mouth to ask for answers she didn’t really want, Signy spoke again.

“We killed them,” she said, and then Mera had to stop applying salve because her daughter was shaking with sobs. She’d used more than was wise already, and she tried to concentrate on calculating how long it would be until she could afford to buy more.  “Oh Maker, we killed them all.”


	2. Signy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks once more to [Sarsaparilla](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarsaparilla/profile) for a swift and insightful betaing

Signy woke that morning a mage of the Circle, or what was left of it, and ended the day as a rebel and a murderer. The rebel part she had intended, and she’d known that would mean causing the deaths of her fellow men and women. Actually having killed was different.

The morning began with forced normalcy. She got up, washed and dressed, and headed for the library, refusing to look over her shoulder for Senior Enchanter Lydia. Her mentor had cornered her in the dining hall late the night before, after most of their fellows had gone to bed. At first the conversation that followed felt like another of their recent arguments about Circle politics. Lydia was an Aequitarian who had leaned further and further toward the Chantry’s position since the events three years ago in Kirkwall. Signy was a Libertarian who was plotting her escape from the Circle, something she thought no one knew. Well, it turned out Lydia knew. Signy supposed that if anyone were to figure it out it would be the woman who had practically raised her.

“Don’t be a fool, girl,” Lydia had hissed over Signy’s cold soup. “Your ideals I can comprehend, but for the Maker’s sake don’t die for them!” Lydia never invoked the Maker unless she was very, very stressed. She’d passed the relevant threshold a month ago, when word had come of the College of Enchanters’ secession from the Chantry, and likely hadn’t had a moment to catch her breath yet.

Signy had said some things then that she would regret for the rest of her life. She’d called Lydia a hypocrite and a coward. Hadn’t she been the one to teach Signy that if she didn’t stand up for her beliefs she wasn’t entitled to espouse them?

Lydia had looked at her with such pity then. She’d opened her mouth to speak, but they’d been interrupted by a Templar who had ordered them to bed. Lydia’s order had been phrased as a suggestion, as was the custom between Templars and senior enchanters, but it had been an order.

She made her way to the library. The appearance of normalcy was key. On her way, she was waylaid by Enchanter Halman, who’d been after her for the last few months about her absence from group Primal spell practices.

“They’re not required,” she reminded him.

“Strongly encouraged, dear,” he countered. “Especially for mages whose stray fire spells set fire to my bear less than a year ago.

She’s assured him she’d be at the session the next day, which wasn’t true. She’d intended to be gone by then. Then she excused herself. A new set of Genitivi’s early publications had just come in and she wanted to get her hands on a particular monograph before anyone else snatched it up, she said. That was true. She thought that of everything about the Circle, she would miss the library the most. She’d retrieved the monograph -- a treatise on Fereldan Alienage culture -- and headed for an out of the way reading room. Again, the appearance of normalcy.

She walked into the room and found three apprentices dead at the feet of a templar. The blood showed better than she would have expected on the youngest apprentice’s red robes. She dropped the Fereldan monograph into the pool of blood, hands trembling with terror, but when the templar cursed and came at her with raised sword she didn’t hesitate, didn’t even think. The flame came to her hands more naturally than it ever had before, and she flung it at the templar with all her will. The templar and the three bodies went up in flames as she stumbled backward, falling to sit on the stone floor of the library. She really hadn’t been practicing her Primal spells enough.

Mages and apprentices clustered around her, rushing to put out the fire that obscured the four corpses in the room and that was now spreading to the library shelves. A small part of Signy wondered how much damage she’d just done to the botany section. A more significant part of her wanted to hide, to run to Lydia, but the largest part of her mind was already whirling with the kind of questions she’d need to formulate a plan. Where were the youngest apprentices? How many templars were on duty this hour, how many at their morning meal? Who could be counted on to neither run nor surrender?

Other mages were crowding in on her, and she was shaking all over now. “What in the Void, girl!” Halman had pushed his way through the throng as Signy pulled herself to her feet.

“The Right of Annulment,” she gasped. She’d known the moment she saw the dead apprentices. “They’ve called for the Right; we need to get out.” Signy could feel tears gathering in her eyes, but she had to keep her head. She grabbed Enchanter Halman’s collar. “The chapel!” she shouted over the growing noise of panicking mages. It was the hour for religious instruction. “The apprentices!”

Halman nodded and struck the floor with the end of his staff, hard. A wave of freezing air swept over the cluster of people, and some quieted. Halman organized the them quickly. He was good with people, a good leader, likely next in line for the first enchanter’s title before things had gone wrong. Though some people slunk away or ran off to fend for themselves, most followed his orders: small groups to alert the rest of the Circle as calmly as possible, the larger group to follow him to the chapel to protect the apprentices. “Above all,” he said, “stay together. Go nowhere alone!”

Signy and two other mages made for the east wing, where the rare books library and the storerooms took up most of the space. By silent agreement the other two, one a younger mage with a remarkably crooked nose who she didn’t know well and the other an elf named Barrym who was Lydia’s current apprentice and thus well known to her, took the front and the rear of their little train, leaving their weakest spellcaster the least exposed. Signy’s face burned with shame. She had never thought being able to throw fireballs or freeze a man in place would actually matter, not like this. She was a scholar, not a fighter.

They passed the word, circumspectly at first, then shouting at the top of their lungs as the sounds of struggle from the rest of the Circle grew louder. There were few templars in the east wing, and, as was normal, not many mages either. The second man Signy killed was lightly armored, and she drove an ice spike through his chest on her second fumbling try. It only hit her then that she was a killer now. The first templar had happened in a panic, but this time she was trying to think, trying not to act on instinct. The pit that opened in her gut felt impossibly huge, and it was trying to pull her in, to suck her into despair. She wouldn’t let it.

By the time they reached the end of the wing, the crook-nosed.

 _Amari_ , Signy suddenly remembered. _Her name was Amari._

When she and Barrym came upon Lydia, Signy’s first feeling was a kind of relief that almost, _almost_ did something to shrink that hole in her gut. Her first impulse was to run to the Enchanter and sob into her robes like she was still a little girl.

“Get away from her!” shouted Barrym, and it was only then that Signy saw the figure Lydia was crouched over, a figure dressed in templar armor save for her helmet. The young woman was bleeding from a wound to her temple, and by the gentle light Lydia’s hands cast, Signy realized she was trying to heal her.

“She’s no threat,” said Lydia, not turning from her spell. She thought Barrym was trying to protect her.

“Lydia, get away from her,” said Signy. She must not know. But how could she not know? They’d been shouting it through the halls. The whole Circle was swarming like a hive of hornets turning in on itself. “They’ve called for Annulment, we have to get out!”

 _I’m so scared,_ she thought. _Lydia, there’s blood all over me and I’m so, so scared._

“I know! I’m trying to save this woman’s life, girl, can’t you see that?”

Signy didn’t understand. Barrym did.

“You’re trying to _help them_?” the words exploded from him and Signy could feel the magic crackling around him. He was a good mage, would be a great one one day, twice as skilled at nineteen as Signy was at twenty seven. He wasn’t losing control, as she first feared. He was gathering power, and not to help.

“Barrym, stop!” Signy shouted. The storage room was quiet, and her voice echoed.

“I’ve told you what they did to me, Lydia,” said Barrym, and there was something in his voice that begged. “You said you believed me.”

“It wasn’t this woman who hurt you,” said Lyida. She still hadn’t turned back to them, deep in concentration as she was. It must have been quite a wound, probably affecting the brain. Lydia was a skilled healer. “Barrym, it wasn’t her. I know her, and I’m not leaving her to die.”

The templar was young, perhaps even younger than Barrym. Just a kid. But Barrym wasn’t seeing that, Signy realized. She knew what it meant when a mage said that a templar had hurt them in that tone.

Barrym released the magic he had gathered in a blast of power that slammed the templar into a wall and stove in her breastplate. Lydia, caught in the edge of the blast, was slammed against a pillar.

Signy let out a yell and ran to Lydia. She was lying on the ground, her head at a strange angle. She wasn’t breathing. Signy sobbed, threw healing spells she hadn’t tried since her Harrowing at Lydia, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she were the best healer in Thedas. Lydia was gone. So, when Signy stood with a hand on the pillar to steady herself, was Barrym.

* * *

The third man Signy killed found her running for the chapel, tears blurring her vision. She had to keep going. She had to keep her head. She had to keep going, even if the destination didn’t seem to matter anymore.

The templar nearly slammed into her as she rounded a corner, then grabbed her as she tried to dart past. He’d lost his sword somewhere, she saw, and only then realized her staff was gone.

This man still had his helmet, though the crest was gone. He found herself staring at his visor, at her reflection in it. Her hair was coming out of its braid and her robes were bloody, but aside from the red around her eyes from crying, her face looked just as it had that morning in when she checked herself in the mirror.

The man had a dagger, and now it was in his gauntleted hand. For a split second the dagger was frozen in the air above her face as the templar hesitated. Maybe he was as young and green as the woman Lydia had tried to save. Maybe he just had more of a conscience than his fellows. Then the dagger came down.

Signy jerked her head sideways and instead of plunging into her eye the dagger sliced along her cheek and up toward her hairline. The templar drew it back to strike again. Signy wrenched out of his grip and pulled the ceiling down, crushing him. She ran, and didn’t stop until she was out the Circle gates, past the smoldering wreckage of the templar barracks and into the forest beyond.

* * *

 

Signy spent the night on the floor of the apartment. Her mother had awkwardly offered her Hanol’s side of her bed, but Signy had opted for the floor. Her mother’s bed was big enough for two elves who didn’t mind being pressed close together, but not for a human and an elf. She woke with a nasty crick in her neck and the feeling that the pit in her stomach had only deepened during the night. She’d hoped sleep would help. At least she couldn’t remember her dreams.

 

There was watery light filtering through the window in the front room. Signy started making breakfast. She remembered more of where things would be than she’d expected, but she hadn’t cooked for herself in… well, ever. She’d helped her mother, but after coming to the Circle there had been simple but filling meals prepared by tranquil. Breakfast did not go well.

Half an hour later Osin stumbled out of the closet-sized room Signy had slept in as a child, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with one hand. Scars were visible on the back of that hand in the growing morning light. He stopped when he saw Signy seated in the chair farther from the window and rubbed his temples.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said. He didn’t grit his teeth, but it looked like he wanted to.

“Breakfast,” answered Signy. She’d given up on porridge and was chopping some apples to go with toasted bread.

Osin crossed the room and grabbed the knife from Signy’s hand so roughly she found herself reaching for a spell. She tamped down the instinct despite the fact that Osin was now holding the knife inches from her face. They stared at each other down the length of its blade, and for a moment Signy was back in the Circle, facing down that last Templar. Osin was holding the kitchen knife the same way the Templar had held the dagger. Signy stayed perfectly still, but her breath was coming fast and shallow.

After what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, Osin put the knife down next to an apple.

“Those aren’t cheap,” he said. “Mother was going to dry them for Satinalia. Good job with breakfast, though.”

Signy grimaced.

“I apologize,” she said.

“Good,” said Osin. “You can make it up to us by getting out of our lives and staying there this time.”

Signy’s anger flared. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding it back, buried as it was under layers of exhaustion, grief and residual fear. She grabbed hold of it, reined it in, but she didn’t try to stop it. She had a right to be angry.

“Did you think I was planning to stay?” she said. She planted her hands on the table and leaned toward Osin. He was tall for an elf, but she was tall for a human, and she overtopped him by a couple inches. Her plans had been thrown into chaos by the Annulment, or she wouldn’t be here at all.

Osin’s head snapped back, shocked, but then he sneered.

“‘Course you’re not,” he said. “You don’t need to stick to the alienage. So why are you here in the first place?”

Signy kept staring him down.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she said through gritted teeth. “But I’m not going to endanger you or our mother by staying any longer than necessary.” Just what kind of monster had he built her into within his mind? Osin had been a baby when she’d left and she’d been barely more than a toddler. She’d taught him to sit up by propping him up in her lap until he could stay that way by himself. His first word had been ‘Mama,’ but ‘Siggy’ had followed by the time she’d gone to the Circle. She hadn’t expected some sort of instant rapport, had reminded herself as she sat waiting for them to come home yesterday that he wouldn’t even remember her, but she hadn’t expected this bitter rage.

Her mother was standing in the doorway. Signy felt her cheeks go red. She picked up the knife again and finished chopping her apple. There were still a few uncut. That was something.

Osin stalked out the door as their mother came to sit beside Signy.

“What just happened?” Mera asked.

“He doesn’t remember me,” said Signy. It felt better in her mouth than ‘he hates me.’

“He’s an angry young man,” said Mera. Then, “I see you found the apples.”

“I didn’t realize how important they were.”

“We can spare a few to celebrate.”

“What are we celebrating?” asked Signy.

“You,” said Mera, and Signy found herself caught between a tentative smile and a grimace. She stayed silent.

* * *

 

Signy spent the first hour after her mother left for her job as a housemaid sitting in a corner and repeating the facts to herself mentally until she could face them nearly without flinching: 

_The Circle is gone. Lydia is dead. I’ve killed three people._

Eventually, she started teasing out implications.

 _I’ve killed three people._  

She could tell herself it had been in defense of herself as much as she wanted, but that wasn’t going to make it any less true. Eventually it might make it less painful, but that would take time. She could deal with her guilt later, when she wasn’t in so much danger. The powers that be wouldn’t know she’d killed anyone, not for sure, and she felt an instinctive moment of hope at that though. But she was apostate. She was as good as dead, or, worse, Tranquil, if she was caught.

_Lydia is dead._

Once, about a year after Signy had come to the Circle, she’d called Lydia ‘mama.’ The then-enchanter had flinched and knelt down to put her face at a level with Signy’s. They weren’t family, Lydia had said. They were mages, and they would help each other, but they couldn’t think of each other as family. She hadn’t said why at the time, but now Signy knew. Losing friends was painful enough. Losing a woman she had, despite that warning, come to think of as a mother, felt like a piece had been carved out of her. She felt absurdly guilty for that, here in her real mother’s home, but it was true and she refused to ignore it. Lydia deserved that, and so much more. Her life, for one. 

_The Circle is gone._

Signy had no way to know who was alive and who dead. Her friends, her teachers, the young man she’d considered a scholarly rival and quietly been attracted to… they could all be dead. They could all have survived. Trying to find out would put her in even more danger than she was already in.

There would be a manhunt, not just city guards and any remaining templars but mobs of civilians. Without the phylacteries the destroyed barracks had held, they were all equally dangerous. There would also be no records left to connect her to her mother and Osin immediately, but people in the alienage would remember that Mera’s daughter had been taken to the Circle all those years ago. They’d likely offer that information up freely. If not, they were poor enough that even her mother’s close friends would be tempted. They’d tell themselves Mera’s daughter wasn’t actually there, that it was just history. Signy would die anyway, and likely her mother and brother, too.

She had to leave. It would hurt her mother and please Osin no matter when she did it. It would be better, then, to do it now.


End file.
